Why do Obama, Reid and other Democrats keep claiming that they believe they will be able to work with Republicans in Congress after the Midterm elections? Indeed, Obama and Reid have stated that they expect the Republicans to compromise on important issues for the good for the country.
Heh guys, it’s not going to happen. Rachel Maddow last night explained why its nuts to think that a Republican majority filled with faith based Tea Partiers and Republicans scared to go against their base will seek to find common ground to work with the President on anything.
Seems pretty clear to me. The only Republican goal the GOP will be focusing on like a laser is making Obama a one term President. And if that means shutting down the government in the worst economic crisis of our times and endangering any hope for job growth, so be it.
As Paul Krugman explains, this is not 1994-2000 all over again, and Obama is not standing in Bill Clinton’s shoes:
In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.
Kruigman goes on to list the reasons why this isn’t going to be the Clinton era redux:
1. The Tea Party. Any Republican with an itch to “do the right thing” and work with Democrats on any issue to reach a consensus is going to have his or her Tea Party colleagues and their rabid base breathing down their necks. Establishment Republicans will think twice before making happy talk with President Obama for that reason alone.
2. The Economy. In the mid-90’s the economy was booming thanks to the hi tech sector. Stimulus spending wasn’t needed to provide jobs. Today, however, with the incentives in the Tax Code for corporations to outsource jobs to countries with cheaper, better educated work forces, and no attempt by Republicans to change that benefit for multi-national corporations, job growth in America doesn’t exist.
Couple that with higher personal consumer debt levels, than we had in the 90’s and massively higher rates of unemployment and you have a significantly lower demand for goods and services. And while the original Obama stimulus was partly beneficial it was too small to truly reverse the effects of the black hole eight years of the GOP’s Bush-o-nomics created. Unless the government can jump start demand, companies won’t invest here in the US of A in new facilities and will not hire any new employees.
Supply-side economics has proven it is a failure. Supply follows demand. If there is insufficient demand for goods and services her in the US, the wealthy and large corporations companies will take their investment surpluses to places where their is a growing demand: East Asia and Europe, where many governments are actively involved in stimulating the private sector through government stimulus spending. See, for example, the Chinese government ‘s investment in fostering high speed rail technology and green technologies for just one instance of where this is occurring).
3. Deflation v. Inflation. In the 90’s an overheated economic boom risked inflation, but that was a job the Federal Reserve could handle without much assistance from the government. Today, because of the massive levels of consumer debt and joblessness brought on by the bursting of Wall Street’s artificially created real estate bubble in 2007-2008, deflation is the concern. The Fed isn’t created to deal with deflation all by its lonesome. It needs help from the government to stimulate demand to pull us out of this particular “economic trap” as Krugman calls it.
However, government intervention to stimulate the economy and prevent deflation is not a policy option for Republicans. Such policies would go against what they’ve told their base we must do, and after seeing many of their colleagues lose primaries to the most radical tea party candidates that is unlikely to happen. No, they would rather see the country fail so they can defeat Obama in the 2012 election. That is their only plan. And once they assume control of the presidency again we will see massive corruption in favor of corporations and their lobbyists, the further reduction of civil liberties and the promotion of a radical fundamentalist Christian religious agenda, just as we saw during the Bush era.
So we have great reasons to fear Republican gains in this election. We have no reason to expect them to “compromise” or work with Democrats. None at all.
What Obama says in public and how he negotiates in private are two different things. Krugman forgets that not all politics is conducted in public. And the more contentious the issue, the more likely it is to be negotiated in private. Those instances in which Obama seemed to be negotiating with himself in retrospect look like moments when he really was negotiating to get Democratic unity in Congress.
Obama is pretty much constrained to being gracious in order not to stir up the armed crazies more than the GOP already has done. In fact, this might be the primary GOP strategy rather than the party of No strategy — threaten the President’s life. So he is going to press for conciliation publicly and the Republicans are going to press their opposition to policy publicly.
But in the next year if Republicans win a House (probably the House), they will have to put their positions on the line instead of just having general opposition. And their positions look like they always have. You will begin to see some buyers remorse in voters. And they will attempt to argue if the economy picks up over the next two years that the policies they forced on the President, not the President’s accomplishments are what saved the economy. In order to do that, the economy will have to actually be saved. And that requires additional expenditures. Look for Republicans to try to push those toward the military instead of infrastructure. They can hide their big stimulative deficits behind the fog of national security. Republicans in order to do anything at all will have to compromise to avoid disaster for the GOP in 2012.
On the Democratic side, look for the House to be more, not less aggressive despite their fewer numbers and public statements that they expect that power will moderate the GOP. The attitude of the Senate depends on who wins and who loses both on the Republican side and the Democrats.
And don’t be surprised if the leadership for both parties in both Houses changes. In the House, Eric Cantor is likely to make his move win or lose, and Steny Hoyer will have to scramble with losses in the Blue Dog caucus. In the Senate, Schumer is likely to make his move and so is DeMint. The likelihood of this is less than 50-50 but not improbable.
Sorry, Obama really intends to “work with” the GOP.
Stop thinking he’s playing 11th dimensional chess.
Obama is what he is. He won’t fight. And we’re doomed.
The difference with GOP controlling a House of government is that they will have to “work with” Obama.
Stop thinking that not fighting publicly is not fighting. The bills that were enacted were not in the GOP platform. And the Koch brothers are funding only Republicans for a reason. That reason is climate change legislation and investments in sustainable energy. Investments that gut the oil economy.
Krugman drops a trick. One of the reasons the US Government did so well during the tech boom was that Bush Sr. had raised taxes and stabilized things after the fiscal fantasy of the Reagan years. It cost him his presidency, as the Movement Conservatives were already bent on destroying the economy and the press called him a wimp for raising taxes. Then the moderates left the Party under the Perot banner. It should have killed the Republicans. The people who call themselves Republicans now are no such thing.
And…Clinton raised taxes and lost the house to the Repugs in 1994 over the tax hikes. I remember Bob Kerry making a big self serving poitical cover speech about how he would not sink Clinton’s presidency by voting against his budget. It set the stage to take advantage of the tech boom. The G.W.Bush tax cuts have cut Capital gains and dividends to next to nothing and nothing. We could not rebound like that again with the tax structure in place now.
but yes there was some sanity left in the Repugs during Bush #1.
I dont think the American people want the two sides to declare war. For Obama and the Dems to come out fighting would not help this country at all.
Speak softly and carry a big stick sounds better to me. I dont believe Obama will cave or any of the other Dems.
They can do it, create complete mayhem on the employment front, yet pay no price, more’s the pity.
The ‘government should sit-around-its-kitchen-table-and-balance-the-budget-like-a-family-does’ meme is so deeply entrenched that further fiscal stimulus is impossible now, and even more impossible later.
As a result, not-spending is sellable as a virtuous thing to do — in a way that failing to employ millions, and causing millions more to lose their jobs never would be.
Many of the laid-off will even agree that laying them off was ‘the right thing to do’ because they don’t see an economy out their window, they see a morality play, where virtue (retrenchment) is rewarded, and vice (stimulus) is punished. In an economy the opposite is true, but it flies in the face of centuries of storytelling.
Many of the laid-off will even agree that laying them off was ‘the right thing to do’ [..]
That really is the issue, isn’t it — people are that disengaged from their own lives.
Not disengaged, so much as a slave to the narrative.
Republicans can pay no price only if they are in the minority in both Houses of Congress.
They will stimulate the economy through Congressionally-dictated increases in military spending with the rest of the budget items sacrificed as the PAYGO.